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Abstract

This thesis involves a corpus-based cross-linguistic examination of one aspect of the overt expression of causality, comparing and contrasting the uses of six conjuncts of result in two languages. The actual lexemes in the study are English so, therefore, and thus, together with Norwegian så, derfor, and således. Uing data from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus, profiles for each of the six conjuncts are first developed on the basis of semantic, syntactic, and discourse features. The three pairs of expressions are then contrasted cross-linguistically in order to discover how these words differ from one another in their usage. The semantic analysis is based upon the idea of a scale of speaker involvement which has been developed by several researchers who have contrasted causal connectives in Dutch, French, and German. Bernd Kortmann s scale of informativeness (1991) also provides the framework for an examination of the variation in interpretation of the six lexemes. The syntactic analysis primarily involves an examination of sentence positioning, and the discourse analysis looks into both overall frequency as well as distribution in the categories of fiction and non-fiction. The translations of the six conjuncts are then examined to discover what happens to them in the translation process.